Lost property: What Berlin is really like

Despite strong headwinds and a number of reservations from Berlin, the municipality was declared Greater Berlin in 1920 by a legal decision by the Prussian state parliament. The capital of the Weimar Republic became a cosmopolitan city in terms of area and population. After London and New York, it was one of the largest metropolises with four million Berliners. The political, economic and cultural center of the German Republic should also become a magnet for visitors. The “Central Office for Tourism for Greater Berlin” was tasked with promoting the municipality, located on the Spree, Havel and Panke, as an attractive and cosmopolitan city.

This goal was served, among other things, by the publication “Berlin under the spotlight” published in 1924 by the Berlin Fichte Verlag (Paul Wustrow). The publication, which runs over one hundred pages and includes a selected advertisement and address appendix, is preceded by lines from the mayor Gustav Böß, who was elected in 1921. The left-liberal local politician welcomes this writing because it is intended to counteract everyone who “uses every opportunity to disparage Berlin in the eyes of everyone.” The contributions from fifty personalities published here, authenticated with signatures, were opposed to this. They were Prussian officials and local politicians, directors and industrialists, business people, scientists, journalists and artists who, from different standpoints and “under the light of an unbiased love of truth,” wanted to show the world “what Berlin really is” with individual judgments.

»Berlin rooms can be scolded, but Berlin women’s rooms never do!«

Gustav Hochstetter

Already with the cover picture by the painter Max Liebermann, the self-confessed Berliner who had been president of the Prussian Academy of Arts since 1920, Berlin is presented as a historic city worth seeing. Pictured is the view of Pariser Platz from the window of his home and studio. The writers and journalists Gerhart Hauptmann, Else Lasker-Schuler, Maximilian Harden and Gustav Hochstetter also joined the request to support the publication project with a contribution. Nobel Prize winner Hauptmann acts urbane and defends Berlin from critics for whom “Magnet Berlin” is too loud and hectic. In contrast to New York, it is an idyll. The expressionist avant-garde poet Lasker-Schuler (at the same time the exception in the male-dominated author circle) interprets Berlin as a “circling world factory,” while Harden describes his birthplace as a city of immigrants and migrants, “which has no tradition, tolerates none and whose “culture” is different should give birth every day.”

And Hochstetter, humorist and author of numerous glosses, contributes a humorous paean to the Berliner. He writes: »I … praise the Berlin women,/ I love the Berlin woman!/ I have traveled through Europe’s empires/ From London to the Black Sea,/ I found nothing that I can compare with her/… She shines out of them Pupils/ The most genuine ‘Berliner Blau’./ Berlin rooms can be scolded,/ Berlin women n- rooms never!” With Gustav Hochstetter’s name and his works, which appeared in the satirical magazine “Lustige Blatter” among others, there are only a few people left these days can start something. In 1942 he became a victim of the persecution of the Jews, was deported and died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. A stumbling block commemorates Hochstetter’s long-time home in Pieskow, now a district of Bad Saarow, and a hundred years after his verses about Berlin women, his autobiographical notes “A Humorist’s Life”, stored in the Fürstenwalde Museum Archives, were published for the first time this year.

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The collection published by the “Central Office for Tourism for Greater Berlin” ends with a contribution by Adolf Wermuth, briefly mayor from October to November 1920. In the style of his time, he confesses: “Berlin encompasses just as much real humanity, as much work sense and brave striving and certainly no less steadfastness than any settlement of the present. Except that it may be easier elsewhere to hold onto and develop these good qualities.

This hundred-year-old Berlin publication is not only a testament to city marketing in the 1920s, but also offers a lot of material for further cultural, literary and urban historical studies.

Reading tip: Gustav Hochstetter, “A humorist’s life. Cheerful memories by Gustav Hochstetter« (ed. by Wolf D. Hartmann, Brandenburgischer Akademieverlag, 202 pages, br., 15 €)

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